October 2020
Featured Article
Enlightened Self-Interest: Some Thoughts from an EE Senior in March 1968
By: Kenneth Connor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
With age comes perspective, sometimes wisdom and tested knowledge. Age also often forces us to live through things again. 2020 has made me think of two hugely important time periods in US history: 1918 thru 1920, because of the 1918 H1N1 Flu Pandemic and the 1960s, which was marked by political turmoil, assassinations, war and political division throughout the world. I was an electrical engineering student at UW-Madison during the latter period (1964-1970, to be precise) and my father’s parents died in the former, barely 2 weeks after he was born. He, his brother and his sister were among the hundreds of thousands of children who were orphaned when 675,000 people were killed by the flu. Growing up the way he did made my father exceptionally self-reliant and hard-working, traits which he largely succeeded in passing on to me, which, in turn, have made me a better engineer. Over the last several months, I have thought often about what I owe him, but even more about what it was like to be an EE student in the 60s. I would like to share one of the ideas that became clear to me then that remains significant today.
During the 1967-68 school year, when I was a senior, a good friend and I served as officers in our HKN chapter. At the time, it was quite common for young people interested in promoting change to publish newsletters which had to be laboriously typed on stencils and duplicated on mimeograph machines. Fortunately, my girlfriend, now my wife of 52 years, was a great typist. We called our newsletter ICBS. We took the name from one of our professors, who rarely finished any proof in class, but rather started them and then wrote ICBS for ‘It Can Be Shown,' followed by the conclusion. We also enjoyed the double meaning from just pronouncing the letters. We were not always smart politically, or consistently wrote all that well, so we managed to anger a significant fraction of the EE faculty with some of our musings. It turned out well in the end, though, which taught me a lot of useful lessons. I would like to share one of the pieces I wrote when the Kerner Commission Report was issued in February of 68. The editors of the UW campus paper, the Daily Cardinal, saw what I had written and asked if they could reprint it as one of their Soap Box pieces. I was quite proud to be published in the Cardinal because it was mostly written by liberal arts majors and I mostly wrote like an engineer. At 21, I was definitely my optimistic self … I still am.
There was an excellent article on how the Kerner Commission got it right in the March 2020 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. The Commission (AKA The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders), was constituted by President Johnson to better understand recent riots that had occurred in cities like Detroit and Newark, which resulted in 43 and 26 deaths, respectively. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1968-kerner-commission-got-it-right-nobody-listened-180968318/) Any online search will provide an almost unlimited amount of additional material to read about the Commission, whose report was only one of a very large number of events that marked the significance of 1968. Another Smithsonian article from January 2018 provides a 1968 timeline for what they termed ‘The Year that Shattered America.’ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/timeline-seismic-180967503/ It was a year with days of great hope, like the beginning of the Prague Spring in January, and many days of despair, like the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June. I wrote the article that follows early in the year, so most of my friends and I were still hopeful and having great fun trying to get Gene McCarthy nominated to replace LBJ.
Self-Interest
The report of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorder is in. Along with blaming the conditions that caused last summer’s riots on a complacent white middle class, it calls for a change in the spirit for all of us when we view the Civil Rights Movement. It suggests a change from support of Civil Rights as a moral duty to support as enlightened self-interest.
What is there about the movement that will do waspish professional class types like us any good? If we divorce our thoughts from the present for a moment and look at history, the answer will become clear.
The story of the immigrant peoples of this nation, from Plymouth Rock to Monty Rock III, has been one of an ever increasing percentage of the populace coming to enjoy the benefits of technological and social advances. Each generation finds itself with a few more people a little better off than their forebears. We now have an extremely large middle class, the one socio-economic characteristic of a nation most important in creating an atmosphere of stability.
We have doggedly risen from a wilderness colony to the most powerful state in the world by opening up our horn of plenty to more people all the time. In the late seventeenth century, the “Half-Way Covenant” heralded the end of religious oligarchy which allowed the talents of the many instead of the few to inaugurate our economic growth.
Increasing suffrage to non-landowners, then Negroes and women; encouragement to settlement of the West; and recognition of labor unions all gave better life chances to more people. Other changes in less tangible areas, like popular feelings have worked toward the achievement of a most important goal. That goal is to create conditions whereby we can be assured that no innate talent that could lead to bettering our lives, should be kept from achieving by any social, political or economic forces.
The change in spirit called for by the Commission is a recognition that this nation will never find itself on the road to the full-flowering of its potentialities if we allow the latent talents of the poor to wither and die in our slums. Remember what has made America, with all its faults, still the best place to be born on earth, and then think about what support of the Civil Rights Movement can do for you and your children.
Kenneth Connor (From the Electrical Engineering Honor Society Newsletter, ICBS)
On his 7 June show, John Oliver shared the following quote from Kenneth Clark to the Kerner Commission. Clark said, “I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of 1935, the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of 1943, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot [of 1965]. I must again in candor say to you members of the Commission, it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.” Clark was one of my heroes at the time for his role in Brown v. Board of Ed. If he had made his statement today, he would most likely have referenced the film ‘Groundhog Day,’ which is what it feels like to me. It is ironic on many levels that even those who ‘remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Let’s hope for a much better outcome this time.